On May 2, the Permanent Parliamentary Council on Open and Transparent Governance and its Consultative Group approved the final version of the 2017-2018 Open Parliament Action Plan for Georgia.

The commitments under the action plan reflect the principles and challenges of the Open Government Partnership (OGP). The action plan also includes commitments proposed by Transparency International Georgia:

• Raising public awareness on OGP (co-author: Parliament of Georgia).
• Access to information about citizen entry in the Parliament building and attendance of its sessions.
• Disclosure of the purpose, expenses and source of funding of MP work visits on the Parliament website.
• Defining rules for reviewing the so-called ‘December 10 reports’ on public information.
• Disclosure of information about the absence of MPs with valid excuses from plenary and committee sessions on the Parliament website.
• Improving the content of draft law explanatory notes.
• Introduction of an obligation to substantiate amendments to the agenda.

For the following two commitments proposed by Transparency International Georgia, the Parliament approved of the idea, but did not include them in the action plan:

• Introduction of a subscription service for receiving parliamentary information through newsletters and SMS (text) messages.
• Disclosure of stenographic records.

According to the members of the Permanent Parliamentary Council and representatives of the Parliament, lack of human and financial resources was the reason why these commitments were not included in the action plan.

The working meeting involved a detailed discussion of each commitment. Members of the Council and the Consultative Group were given a chance to express their views regarding the commitments and recommendations. The final version of the action plan will be submitted to the Parliament of Georgia.